Essays: “I Have Something Else To Say” by Emily Lu
这不用学回家就好 or I have Something Else to Say
I’m reading a first poetry collection from 陳繁齊, whose instagram handle is @dyingintherain. It is delivered in about four days, along with a MDZS novel I want to struggle through in the untranslated text. I am about two-thirds of the way through the author’s preface. I haven’t gotten to any of the poems yet. This slow reading in some ways I find very inconvenient. I’m not patient. The text lies ahead, and I anticipate getting closer in my own time.
漫长 màn cháng, an adjective I’ve heard several times in pop lyrics used to describe anything from the length of a street to a summer.
I am seven when the world turns incomprehensible for the first time. I am envious of my classmates who open their mouths and are understood, who ask for things. Something I can no longer do after eleven thousand kilometres. I am also quite proud. I remember deciding 这不用学回家就好 I don’t need to learn this everyone I love is at home.
English is the first language where I learn the word for racism, and shame, and also the vocabulary to begin to talk about them.
How desperately I want to speak myself into existence, to prove to my classmates that I too have an interior world. For a while return still means reversal, a plane ticket.
A medical school professor observes: “You’re quiet in class. Does it have to do with your fluency?” I feel this incident must be an aberration.
Fluency: The only language I understand completely is shame.
I often mistake homonyms for another, in small, accidental meanings. 漫长 I had always heard as 慢长, as in slow & long (like Canada Post?), where really the water radical seems to imply a welling-up-of, like rainwater flooding the sidewalk.
I remember trying that evening to wring the words together to express the rage, the exasperation to prove something bad had happened in a letter to the dean. In an act of foresight, I save that file as complaint #1.
Language can be a violence. I do not want to be fluent in the language weaponized by medical institutions. Abuses of power conveniently translated into a communication problem. That conscripts people into its easy cruelties.
A postgraduate program director warns in an email that I should keep my tone professional. Still I feel this incident must be an aberration.
A second program director says they see a pattern in my communications. Their office enrolls me in a mandatory crucial conversations course so I can learn this. I feel this
Singer-songwriter 毛不易 wrote, 就慢慢的忘了吧 因为回不去啊 那闭上眼睛就拥有了一切的盛夏 (so slowly slowly forget because you can’t go back close your eyes and take the remains of everything). An accurate translation of 一切的盛夏would be all of celebratory mid-summer, its heights, but I hear the homonym what’s left, and I don’t think it’s accidental. 拥有 is more possess than take. How to convey ownership, without action.
I can’t trust meaning, that words mean what I think they mean, what I intend. In that gradeschool classroom, other kids laugh themselves silly when I pronounce things the way I see them on the page. My languages are mine to use badly, and I have no claim of ownership over them at all. I feel like my relationship to them is one of proximity, and therefore distance. I don’t trust languages. I believe in mine.
About Emily Lu
Emily Lu was born in Nanjing. She is a poet and resident physician in psychiatry. Night Leaves Nothing New (Baseline Press 2019) was shortlisted for the bpNichol chapbook award.